Sculpting On A Budget - The Armature

[Music] hello ladies and gentlemen welcome to Florence Italy today we are going to be sculpting on a budget the idea is that I want to show you how I started out sculpting how I practiced in my small apartment bedroom in Oslo long before I had my own studio and long before I ever came to Florence I want to show you that you can do this essentially with minimal resources and practice and build up a portfolio that you can use to apply for whatever art educational institution you're dreaming of attending so I've set up a set up that more or less much as what I had in my bedrooms a small desk in an office chair from Ikea All Things Considered this is a pretty accurate representation with the exception of the surrounding studio of course you'll have to imagine that I'm in a bedroom before any sculpting can be done we need to make an armature obviously and I'll show you how I used to make armatures that allowed me to make sculptures that look good and photographed well without the need of creating a mold and a cast and without armature wire sticking out of butts or heads spoiling the effect of a finished sculpture this is the materials we'll be using for making the armature laid out in front of us on the table here we have aluminum armature wire and three different gauges we have a cordless drill some needle nose pliers a side cutter and a really nice heavy-duty lazy susan that I've actually had since I started sculpting if you stick around until the next episode in the series where we will Scott I'll tell you a funny story about this lazy susan because we are trying to make something we can use as a portfolio piece potentially at least so we can apply to our favorite art school the Florence Academy of Art for example will make sure the piece descends well we're in our bedroom here there's no room to make a mold so we need to present the clay pieces has to be cat painting the base a uniform black goes a long way in this case the base is just a simple piece of wood you can use a nicer resin plinth if you have one or you can go to a hardware store and buy one of those wooden pieces meant to sit atop a pole and offense I think they're called crown pieces or perhaps captive pieces a lot of times they will have some pretty nice to signs and look really good as makeshift basis here I'm just using a simple cutter from a wooden plank I painted it with black acrylic paint black base will photograph really well which is important for me here make sure you not only paint the top but also the the edges once that done we'll leave the base to trial while we make the armature the wire we'll be using is 1/8 inch and 3/16 inch for three-point 17 millimeters and 4.76 millimeters if you're in Europe you can find aluminum armature wire online at Toronto dost coat UK there's a link in the description below and if you're in the US you can go to complete sculptor com sometimes you can find it at hobby or art supply stores as well though this can be a little bit rare the reason we use aluminum is because it is a dead metal which means it doesn't have any spring to it essentially if you bend it it'll stay the way you bent it I have this little cheat sheet with me today this is very similar to what I used when I did this in my bedroom actually it's a quick and easy guide and it helps me work out some of the proportions and ensure we don't make an armature that's completely useless if you just Google proportional diagrams a lot of these should pop up you can import them to Photoshop and scale them up or down to whatever size sculpture you want to make mine is around 20 centimeters or 8 inches tall which is what our sculpture will be as well so to begin with I'll cut off a generous piece of wire as you can see it's looped at the top and way longer than what I'll need or at least so it seems but this will all make sense in a second I line it up with my cheat sheet and grab the wire making sure there's plenty of wire extending below the feet which I'll need for the hips and to attach the wire into the base then I twist the wire tightly together making the twisted section of the wire about as long as the torso I compare on my cheat sheet to make sure I've more or less nailed up portions I don't want the twisted section to extend any further than the pit of the neck which is where the your two clavicles meet and where you're next to get at the top of the ribcage then I cut the loop section at the top this is going to turn into my arms very very soon let's thank today's sponsors my patreon supporters on patreon who have ensured the continued existence of this channel and allowed me to upgrade my gear bit by bit making better looking and better sounding content for all of you watching if you are interested in supporting the channel or perhaps interested in getting personal feedback on your sculptures from me then patreon is the place for you you'll get in-depth feedback on techniques and how you can apply them to your own work anything sculpture related goats we can talk about armature supplies mold making anything you need help with in your sculpting endeavors so check it out there's a link in the description below I bend the width of the shoulders into the formerly looped section of the wire and I bent the weight of the hips into the leg section and voila we have a little stick figure mane and this is the basis for our armature this little stick figure man was made with one 8-inch armature wire or 3.17 millimeters and the problem right now is that our legs are too thin to support the weight of the clay once we start sculpting and the result will be a very very wobbly sculpture that's a nightmare to work on and that could collapse under its own weight so we need to reinforce the legs we'll do that with the 3/16 inch or four-point 76 millimeter wire and it's fairly simple I just make a copy of the legs I've already made using the thicker armature wire there are many ways that you could reinforce a piece like this but this is pretty much the easiest way I think and that leaves you and it also leaves you with no armature wire sticking out of the buttocks of the head it'll photograph and present well as a finished piece without the need for mold making and casting the thicker wire needs to be added to the rest of our armature and the easiest way to do this is with thin wrapping wire you don't need aluminum wire for this I happen to have it but it's not necessary at all anything wire will do really wrap the wire tightly around the two pieces to hold them together and if you wrap tightly enough there will be no need for any glue at all they will be more than strong enough and be held together very much the only issue with this technique is that your legs and especially your ankles end up being potentially a little bit thick I'll run into this whenever I start sculpting and we'll discuss some potential fixes to make life a little easier folks we obviously don't want our sculpture to have cankles one of the things that make an elegant the natural-looking sculpture is the tapering of the limbs from thick at the top or closer to the center of the body to thin towards the extremities and if we can't achieve that because of the armature wire that's not a good thing so with every solution comes some sacrifices in this case we got rid of any external armature but we pay for it by having leg armatures that might be a little bit thicker than what we'd prefer the arms will also need the same wrapping wire as the clay needs something to grab onto otherwise it'll slide around on our armature making working on it more of a pain that it needs to be the twisted torso section doesn't need wrapping wire as the clay will grab well on to the twisted wires and that's it one simple human armature built we don't need armature for the head at this scale the clay will be able to support itself and the weight of the head with no problem in the past I have stuck a small piece of armature wire into the clay around the neck once I've started sculpting as a support for the head and that works well enough if you really feel like you need to have so now the armature only needs to be attached to the wooden base here is something to note by the way I should have planned out the pose before this and post the armature properly and somewhat accurately before attaching it to the base because the legs are stuck to the base here we have limited options for bending the wire into the post that we want we'll discuss this more in the next part about sculpting however just know that it's a smart idea to post the armature wire close to what you want before gluing it into the base to glue the armature into the base I'll need holes to glue it into first and the holes are drilled into the base using my cordless drill now this drill bit as you can see is a little overkill but I had it and I haven't had an opportunity to use it yet and so this was a fine opportunity and I took my chance I ended up almost drilling straight through the base which is fine but there's no reason to do it as the only thing that comes of it is that the glue leaks out at the bottom but if you pay close attention you'll notice that I'll have a trick for this as well with the holes drilled I make sure the armature is going to fit a snug fit is preferable for sure as it along with the glue will help all the armature in place while we sculpt it's very annoying if the armature gets worked loose while we're working and it can also be a little bit difficult to fix depending on what stage of the sculpture your apt [Music] we could use something simple like superglue but we have our goal set on a career as a sculptor here and so we're gonna bring out the big boys which is two-part epoxy goop it works very straightforward you simply squeeze out two similar beads or blobs out of the tube on a piece of paper and you mix it together very well if you have different amounts of the two components you run the risk of it never setting up and staying gummy and gooey forever and the same can happen if you don't mix it properly sometimes beginning to squeeze out a little until both tubes are relieving themselves of their contents equally and then squeezing out the desired amount you want to mix somewhere else on the paper can be a good trick to ensure you get a proper mix ratio I mix it together with a back of an old brush any any sort of simple tool will do for this of course and I mix for around a minute I think before picking it up and drooping it into the two holes that we drilled [Music] once the holes are filled with epoxy I push the armature into the holes all the way to the bottom letting the glue seep into every crease and crevice I ended up mixing a little less than ideal here so I quickly mixed up some more and pushed it around with the armature seats into the base now we let the epoxy set up it is five minute epoxy but over here it's the end of the day and so I'm gonna go home and wait until tomorrow when I will begin sculpting which will be next Thursday for you if you enjoy the video and want to learn sculpture check out my patreon page I give feedback and critiques on people's work and we talk about whatever you need help with in your sculpting endeavors and right now there is exclusive sculpting content on my patreon the first series we are embarking on is the beginner's guide to figure sculpture I'm super excited to finally be creating exclusive content for patreon and I hope you will be too and we'll take a look the link to my patreon is in the description below [Music] thank you for watching and stay tuned for a new video next Thursday hit the subscribe button and the belt to be notified whenever a new video comes out if you enjoyed the video click the like button and share with your friends and family it helps me out a lot thank you for watching stay creative and I hope to see you in the next one [Music] you you

Channel: Eirik Arnesen Art

Views: 137,762

Rating: 4.9106026 out of 5

Keywords: sculpture, sculptor, maquette, Dante, Inferno, Divine Comedy, tutorial, how to, wip, art, artist, artwork, clay, fine art, realism, naturalism, realistic art, maquette sculpture, water-based clay, tools, step-by-step, inspiration, Questions and Answers, Q&A, AMA, mold making, casting, plaster, silicone, naturalistic art, lifelike art, hyper realism, portrait, portraits, portraiture, terracotta, wed-clay, oil clay, hands, sculpting hands, clay hands, adam's hand, hand of god, oil paint, acrylic paint

Id: 3wI6oTqaL9g

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020